Savage Interview

At the end of the interview there was a section about networks which might be of interest here:

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"A major condition of our times is the disappearance of the centre. Most people are spending their time fixing together some kind of philosophy, and they recognise that it is temporary. Instead of a culture which radiates out to the edges -- still the picture of government in England -- you have more and more nodes which connect in different ways. The centre does not hold them together: they're held together by their own intercommunication, which is very, very rich and always in flux. The flow of information is in all directions."

....

Just as, in his work, he's crossed the boundaries between singer, songwriter, performer, producer, remixer, musician and non-musician, so he's attempting, with his new book, to apply the methods of organisation he sees in pop music to the rest of society, to open things up.

"In the last ten years you've had all these complicated things like sampling, remixing, and people with no background in music making records. All of that is a picture of how things could be organised. If you extrapolate from where that happens in music culture and you start to think 'how could that work over a culture' then you get the network idea, a way of having conversations and reaching consensus without a central mediator.."

"This whole area of self-organised, network systems can't be broken up: you can't control them properly because they're so fluid. People are frightened of it. It seems so threateningly insecure. You have to work for this: you don't learn it all and have it in hand. You have to keep updating. What people really want is to settle down, to say I'm getting old, forget this, I don't want to have to keep thinking about it.

"It was so sickening to see John Major at that Conservative Party Conference, saying we don't want our children studying race relations and sexism. We want them to learn to read and do sums. What he's actually saying is that we don't want people exploring the connections between themselves -- which is for me the interesting issue. The network idea is a revolution in thinking -- which is why has to be chopped off."

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Excerpt from interview with Brian Eno by Jon Savage published in The Guardian 26th November, 93.

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